Enhanced light absorption in bifacial solar cells

Abstract

Solar cell is a semiconductor device that converts sunlight into electricity. Bifacial solar cell is a specially designed solar cell for the production of electricity from both sides of the solar cell. Bifacial solar cell became an active field of research making photovoltaic (PV) more competitive together with current efforts to increase the efficiency and lower material costs. In silicon (Si) solar cell, the inability to absorb all the incident sunlight fundamentally limits the Si solar cell performance. As the wafer is efficiently used by fabricate a bifacial solar cell to save on Si costs, efficiencies will become even lower due to incomplete optical absorption. Subwavelength surface texturing helps offset some of the absorption loss. To trapped more lights, anti reflecting coating (ARC) was studied. There are three type of texturing methods and two type of ARCs that has been studied in this research. According to optical properties of the textured Si wafer and ARC thin film, it was found that wet texturing and SiN are the best methods to improve the light absorption in bifacial solar cell. The efficiency obtained from the bifacial solar cell is 9.62% for front side and 4.5% for back surface.